I am always amused when people start talking about how much experience they have in something. I am in psychology so I can speak more readily on this however, this does expand to other areas of healthcare, teaching, and so on and so forth.

Something that is not spoken about explicitly, assumed and is basically implied is breadth and depth regarding experience. Also, a related concept is transfer of skills. Do you NEED to have breadth and depth, and/or do your skills have reliable transfer? This mean from a job, education, etc to something else or somewhere else? People don’t explicitly discuss this publicly. The danger here is it is assumed, when you hear someone has X amount of years of experience they should be trusted or listened to over someone else. 

Let me give some examples. For my masters and PhD program I was in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Nashville Tennessee. In these settings I was exposed to and had multicultural counseling experiences with both the Hispanic population, and the African-American population, and of course, Caucasians from the United States. This is very important to note, because even though I have X amount of hours of clinical experience with what is considered to be diverse populations I can tell you for certain I have never dealt with hard-core, gang activity from the inner-city. I have not dealt with youth who have grown up with constant gang violence, shootings, stabbings, fights, and those social dynamics, and have literally witnessed death and brutal beatings. I have not dealt with Native American cultures and how their traditions and ways of life interact and conflict with modern United States culture. 

This means if I were applying to a job, for example, in LA at a mental health establishment dealing with gangs, there’s probably no chance I would get a placement there and I would arguably say that would be appropriate. 

Now, look at a person who is a medical doctor in the emergency room as an example. I grew up in Rochester Minnesota, a fairly small town. And I distinctly remember talking with a medical doctor, who pointed out that in Rochester, you don’t see knife and gun violence from human to human. Yes, you’ll have the occasional hunting accident where someone literally shoots themselves in the foot or is shot by accident at a distance. Whereas you’re not dealing with handgun and knife violence in the emergency room on a constant basis. This M.D. indicated if you’re in Chicago, or other ERs around the entire country, that is a daily occurrence as is general violence is a daily occurrence compared to the small town I grew up in. 

Another outside healthcare is archaeology. You can get an archaeology degree and go to amazing sites and help dig up things in deserts or maybe the Amazon. There are also archaeologists who go to the frozen tundra of Russia and for that matter the Arctic circle or Antarctica. They dig up bones and artifacts in those regions as well. The question is do those skills necessarily transfer over from the Amazon to the tundra or from up in the frozen tundra to going to a desert. 

A final example is to think of international relations. You can get a graduate degree in and study international relations and do practical work for your degree between first world countries. For example, the European Union and how those countries interact. Whereas someone else has experience working with Third World countries of Africa, and the conflicts between those countries and literal tribes and how to deal with those groups where they don’t even have running water in houses. Does the knowledge of international relations between these two individuals compare? I doubt it. 

Next, we have to consider time, as in how many hours have they had or years of experience in the area. The point I’m making is that just because someone has five or 10 years working in a given field does not necessarily mean they have the breadth of experience and depth to qualify them to speak on certain topics. I’d rather listen right out of their program to a master’s level counselor who did all of their practicum work specifically working with gangs in LA and did a master’s thesis on counseling gang members than a professor and licensed psychologist (more years of school) who had mainly worked with middle class Caucasian Americans for 30 years.

This post piggybacks on other posts. One which was my post on nitpicking about how getting detail oriented does not mean a person is not correct. It means you don’t have the depth of knowledge they do.

In a related concept relevant to this is arbitrary distinctions. How many practical hours of training does a person need in any given area to actually be credentialed or certified or licensed? I read an article, and I’m also attacking psychology for this where they questioned this concept. The authors pointed out that when PHD level psychologists were tested they scored the same straight out of their PHD programs compared to other PHD’s who did the 2,000 hours post-doctoral training. Furthermore, the study checked in on them years later and looked at complaints, as well as, lawsuits or other infractions. There was no difference between the groups.

This points to how important actual education is compared to experience. If experience is the gold standard we would have all of the aforementioned professions would still in the apprenticeship way of learning. We don’t. Instead you go to school for specific things, to learn principles that can be applied to that field and/or skills that transfer to multiple areas within a given field. Yes, in lieu of education one should default to experience, yet if you have someone well educated in an area you should not default to someone 20 years older assuming their knowledge and skills are applicable. 

When you consider these points, just because someone does have X many years of experience you want to make sure it is actually relevant to what this experience and education is geared towards. You don’t want someone who specialized in counseling children in a well to do community, now thrust into dealing with violent inner-city gangs.